GE plans to sell fuel cells, challenging Bloom

General Electric is launching a startup to sell fuel cells, which would make it a competitor of Bloom Energy, which has a manufacturing center in Delaware. GE announced on Tuesday it has started building

Inside GE's new fuel cell facility in New York.(Photo: General Electric)

a manufacturing plant in upstate New York, building solid-oxide fuel cells that use natural gas, just as Bloom's do.

The business will be run inside the existing GE, which plans to sell the product in the marketplace in 2017 or later, GigaOM is reporting.

Bloom is based in California and has sold many of its solid-oxide fuel-cell servers to major companies with campuses in that state. It opened its East Coast manufacturing center in Newark last year; state officials have said it will employ 900 people by 2016.

On its Web page, GE announced its own product's efficiency can reach "an unprecedented 65 percent," which would make it competitive with Bloom.

"The cost challenges associated with the technology have stumped a lot of people for a long time," says Johanna Wellington, advanced technology leader at GE Global Research and the head of GE's fuel cell business. "But we made it work, and we made it work economically. It's a game-changer."

Meanwhile, another competitor of Bloom, FuelCell Energy Inc., based in Connecticut, said it and a joint venture partner had been awarded a $6.7 million grant from Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, according to MarketWatch.